So yesterday I finally got my “new” Workstation built with an ASUS Z11PA-U12 / Xeon Gold 6230 64GB 2933Mhz RAM and honestly been loving over my previous X399 board with a TR 2970WX and its been rock solid and have had zero slow downs that my TR system had while Encoding and Digesting Video footage pipeline and infact seen some decent improvements, for my FPS in AI Upscaling has gone from 0.23fps with the 2970wx + Radeon Pro Duo to 0.44fpss (pretty much doubled) with the Xeon 6230 + Radeon Pro Duo!
I was hesitant at first due to it being a little older platform but with the perks of having some nicer features such as Hex Channel memory that im planning on using due to being able to grab 384gb 2666 for fairly cheap what would significantly help me as im on the verge of running out of memory again, the Mini SAS and Oculink connectors will also come in handy as looking to get into U.2 and a bunch of SATA Drives for mass storage rather than depending on my current NAS from the mid 2010s what is a huge bottleneck.
Looking forwards to getting myself a new cooler such as the noctua LGA3647 one + a Radeon 7900xt / Workstation counterpart in the next year or so if ever released and hope to run this system for a good few years before considering upgrading, couldnt say that about the 2970wx that seemed to be riddled with little issues and nags.
The Pros:
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Fairly cheap Picked up the ASUS LGA3647 Board + Xeon 4108 + Cooler + 16GB RAM for under $400 got the Xeon 6230 separately for $260
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Its well tested and reliable for the workloads and heavy IO thats about to come into its world
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Has plenty of PCIe lanes and connectors to be able to get what i need done for 2 GPU, 1 NIC + U.2 PCIe card for storage, also turns out this board support Optane Persistent Memory so would love to give that a try for some RAM disk to help increase IO for my AI / Video work
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Has IPMI and BMC so i can now remote in and do what i need todo when needed without pulling myself out of bed to check if i have any errors with a project due to iKVM
The Cons:
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EOL Platform and will no longer receive CPUs
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Due to being older lack of PCIE 4 and therefore being bottlenecked on IO speed
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Was a little tricky to get Windows 11 Enterprise to boot on this board due to my 2x HDDs for whatever disappearing when CSM was disabled, but a BIOS flash fixed that, but wasn’t the best experience with someone whos never dived into Enterprise gear/BIOS’s
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The lack of coolers / 3rd party support for things such as CPUs/Water blocks for the boards *at least the one I am on, cant seem to find a single soul who owns one, but that’s more of a product issue rather than a platform one.
so here’s my two cents on the experience and usage of my new workstation, not sure if anyone is going to read my little ramble / findings but hey feel free to leave any comments and or ideas about what i could try to do to upgrade the system, id be more than willing to listen!